.NET Core 1.1.1 was released today. Both releases include reliability updates to improve the quality of .NET Core. You can download the .NET Core Runtime releases via our .NET Core Runtimes download page. If you are looking for the .NET Core SDK, to get the latest tools, try the .NET Core SDK download page. 

New In-Memory OLTP improvements in CTP3.1 include:

• Unique indexes in memory-optimized tables, to complement the support for unique constraints that was released in CTP3
• LOB data types varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max) in memory-optimized tables and natively compiled modules
• Indexes with NULLable key columns in memory-optimized tables

Syntax inputdate AT TIME ZONE timezone.

• Inputdate: An expression that can be resolved to a smalldatetime, datetime, datetime2, or datetimeoffset value.
• Timezone: Name of the destination time zone in standard format as enumerated by Windows. Available time zones can be found by querying sys.time_zone_info.
  

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) updates allow upgrading your existing models to 1200 compatibility level and a JSON editor for SSDT;

PostSharp 5.1 will focus on providing support for .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Core 2.0. Our objective is to port the PostSharp compiler itself to .NET Standard 2.0 so that we can compile .NET Standard and .NET Core applications natively, without cross-compilation. PostSharp 5.1 will still only support Windows as the only build platform. 

Today, the Entity Framework Core team announces the second preview release of EF Core 6.0. This release includes changes to handling the synchronization context when SaveChangesAsync is called, smoother integration with System.Linq.Async, updates to string concatenation and improvements to free text search. 

Most traditional .NET applications are deployed as single units corresponding to an executable or a single web application running within a single IIS appdomain. This approach is the simplest deployment model and serves many internal and smaller public applications very well. However, even given this single unit of deployment, most non-trivial business applications benefit from some logical separation into several layers. 

1/ It's probably not the first thing you think of, but when we started .NET (COM+) in the late 90s, C# didn't exist yet. We were working on it at the same time as the CLR and the framework. So, you might wonder, what language was being used to generate IL and write the BCL? 

GenFu is a test and prototype data generation library for .NET apps. It understands different topics – such as “contact details” or “blog posts” and uses that understanding to populate commonly named properties using reflection and an internal database of values or randomly created data.  

Native .NET Core Support
In the release 2018.1, we present a full-featured report generator, created using the cross-platform technology — .NET Core. A full set of Web components such as the report designer as well as additional tools for quick export and report printing is available. The .NET Core components are included in the product Stimulsoft Reports.Web and Stimulsoft Reports.Ultimate. 

A robust DevOps environment requires having continuous integration for every component of the system. But far too often, the database is omitted from the equation, leading to problems from fragile production releases and inefficient development practices to simply making it harder to onboard new programmers.

In this article, we discuss the unique aspects of databases, both relational and NoSQL, in a successful continuous integration environment.